Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

708 Eric Trist
UNITED STATES. Members of social science facultiesa (1965) and professional associa-
tionsb (1967)
Faculty
Full-time Part-time Graduate Association
students
teaching
Anthropology 1,000 250 200 6,634
Economics
Political science
Psychology
Sociology
6,395
4,882
6,963
4,840
1,537
1,037
2,486
1.42 I
1,228
913
1,757
869
23,305
14,685
25,800
12,000
Total 24,080 6,731 4,967 82,424
a Faculty data are for universities and four-yew colleges.
Estimated.
SOURCE: Science Activities in Universities and Colleges (NSF 68-22), National Science
Foundation, Washington, D. C., 1969.
20. Professional schools related to the social sciences have also become established
in all leading universities. This is the second feature of the pattern.
These schools are graduate establishments carrying out extensive research
which tends to be multi-disciplinary. In this they have provided a corrective
to the academic departments, though relations with them leave a lot to be desired.
If psychiatry and public health are combined, the table for UCLA illustrates
the dominance of the health field - a characteristic of problem-oriented social
science in the us Schools of Business Administration are another American
innovation which has spread to most countries and in which the social sciences
have established themselves, not only in business economics but in the application
of psychology and sociology to organizational studies. The business schools
have also fostered developments in operational research and systems analysis.
Subjects such as education and social welfare not only train practitioners but
undertake research programmes. More recently, the professional schools have
begun to extend the domain of the social sciences into engineering, architecture
and urban planning.
21. The third element in the pattern is represented by university-wide institutes
exclusively concerned with research. While research in the basic departments
and even in the professional schools tends to be individual, much of it
being concerned with the preparation of doctoral candidates, projects in the
institutes tend to be based on organized programmes involving collaborative
work. Institutes are often quite small, though there are exceptions such as the
Institute of Social Research at the University of Michigan. They draw on the
part-time services of interested faculty from any department and also employ
full-time research workers not on departmental staffs. They :tend to be interdisciplinary
and are often also problem-oriented, though there are conspicuous
exceptions.* In UCLA the first group listed has developed out of the professional
-
of the societies of associates - masters usually completing doctoral studies.
* The pattern seems to be very different in many branches of the biological and
physical sciences where ‘interfaces’ can more easily develop on theoretical premises.